Good morning. It's Tuesday. We'll meet someone who is spending his share of a $1 million prize on lawyers who might end up suing the city. We'll also look at an admission of fraud by a Hasidic school in Brooklyn. |
 | | David Shalleck-Klein is one of five winners splitting this year's $1 million David Prize.Andrea Mohin for The New York Times |
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The first question, inevitably, was about the money. What was he going to do with it? |
Hire a couple of lawyers, said David Shalleck-Klein. "Top-flight civil rights litigators" whose jobs might well include suing the city, he said. |
Shalleck-Klein, 35, is one of five winners splitting this year's $1 million David Prize, a no-strings-attached award established in 2019. It recognizes New York City-based change makers who, its website says, have the "potential to do more amazing work to improve N.Y.C. and the drive to get it done." It was named for the real estate developer David Walentas and set up by his son Jed. |
Shalleck-Klein — who was an attorney with the nonprofit legal group Bronx Defenders — started the Family Justice Law Center six months ago. He said it was the nation's first civil rights organization dedicated to suing government agencies that separate children from their parents. |
Every other area of the law "has an organization that not just plays defense against the government when the government is trying to come against them but uses litigation to sue the government and agencies when they are violating people's rights," he said in an interview. "There's really a gaping void in this kind of advocacy" for the child welfare system, he added. |
He said the need had taken on urgency when the Trump administration began separating families at the southern border. |
But, he said, "family separation doesn't just happen at the U.S.-Mexico border. It happens here, in Harlem. It happens here in East New York. It happens in Williamsbridge, Bronx, and Jamaica, Queens, in the areas of the city that have the highest child poverty rates and the highest percentage of Black residents." He said the city's Administration for Children's Services conducts roughly 50,000 investigations each year that "are predominantly and disproportionately against Black, brown and poor families." |
A spokeswoman for the agency said it was "committed to being responsive to the needs of children and families," adding that its "robust continuum of family support services" had reduced the number of children in foster care to an all-time low. "We are continuing to develop new ways, in partnership with government and community organizations, to keep children safely at home while carrying out our legal mandate to respond to reports of alleged child abuse or maltreatment forwarded to us by the state," she said. |
Besides Shalleck-Klein, this year's David Prize recipients are: |
- Jason Gibson, the founder and president of Hood Code, an after-school program that teaches children who live in New York City Housing Authority projects how to write computer coding.
- Mark Winston Griffith, who started Brooklyn Deep, a digital journalism platform for Central Brooklyn produced by people who live there.
- Dianna Rose of Essential Kitchen Co., a commercial kitchen incubator for chefs and small food-based businesses in Queens.
- Geneva White, a founder of Scope of Work, a talent development agency that trains young people of color.
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Shalleck-Klein said he had set out to be a criminal defense lawyer but was stunned by what he saw when a law-school class took him to Brooklyn Family Court. |
"I was shocked to hear what the allegations were," he said. "They were not about abuses, not about abandonment. They had to do with inadequate child care, not enough food in the home, housing conditions not up to code, dirty clothes — issues that were problems of poverty, problems that could be addressed with services to these families, but the solution the government was proposing was to separate these families." |
From that, he said, he concluded that the system was not addressing the causes of families' problems. "And then I got into court myself" as a young lawyer, and "was shocked at the lack of just really basic due-process protections." |
Prepare for patchy drizzle and a chance of showers, with a high near 70. At night, temps will fall to the low 60s, with showers still possible. |
In effect until Nov. 1 (All Saints Day). |
Two candidates and, finally, one debate |
The two candidates for governor — Gov. Kathy Hochul, the Democrat, and Representative Lee Zeldin, the Republican — will appear tonight in their only debate before Election Day. |
The debate will begin at 7 p.m. and will be carried on Spectrum News NY1. |
With Election Day two weeks away, the contours of the race have changed. Hochul's once seemingly insurmountable lead shrank in two polls released last week, with many respondents saying that fears about crime and inflation were now paramount, issues Zeldin has used to attack Hochul. |
The governor had made abortion access the defining issue of her campaign. Zeldin opposes abortion but has promised not to change the state's rules. |
But over the weekend, as Hochul and Mayor Eric Adams announced what she called "a beefing-up of police presence on the subway platforms and cars," the governor said that New Yorkers were concerned about crime in the subway and that she wanted to "focus on getting that sense of security back." |
"I'm always saying, 'What can we do to make our subways safer?'" she said. "And my answer back to everyone, I say, 'Do whatever it takes." |
 | | Thomas Barrack Jr., right, a longtime friend of former President Donald Trump, is on trial in Federal District Court in Brooklyn.Jefferson Siegel for The New York Times |
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Hasidic school to pay $5 million in fines after admitting to fraud |
 | | Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times |
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The operators of the largest private Hasidic Jewish school in New York State set up no-show jobs for some employees and paid others in cash and coupons, a scheme that made those employees eligible for welfare. School officials also took money intended to feed children and used it subsidize parties for adults. |
Those details were disclosed on Monday as the operators of the school, the Central United Talmudical Academy, admitted in court documents to defrauding a variety of government programs. The school agreed to pay $5 million in fines, in addition to more than $3 million it had already paid in restitution as part of a deal to avoid prosecution. |
Michael Driscoll, the assistant director in charge of the F.B.I.'s New York office, said the admissions made it clear that "there was a pervasive culture of fraud and green in place" at the school. |
"We expect schools to be places where students are taught how to do things properly," he said. Referring to the school by its initials, he added, "The leaders of C.U.T.A. went out of their way to do the opposite, creating multiple systems of fraud in order to cheat the government." |
My colleagues Brian M. Rosenthal and Eliza Shapiro write that the federal investigation into the school's use of government funding stemmed from a narrower criminal case, in which two former school leaders pleaded guilty in 2018 over their roles in the conspiracy to defraud the government. |
Since then, the school has replaced its executive management team and developed new controls, the federal authorities said. As part of the deal to avoid prosecution, the school agreed to be supervised by an independent monitor for three years. |
The school, in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, figured in a New York Times investigation last month that found that Hasidic boys' schools across the state had received hundreds of millions of dollars in government funding while denying their students a basic secular education. The Central United Talmudical Academy received about $10 million in government funding in the year before the pandemic, according to a Times analysis. |
I placed my bag of vegetables on the bench at a bus stop on Broadway, across from the farmers' market, and said hello to a woman who was sitting there. |
She took a plastic bag out of her cart and a pair of scissors out of her purse and began to cut some greens she had in a large baggie. |
"How come?" I asked, motioning toward the scissors. |
"It saves me time," she said. |
The bus pulled up, and I walked to the curb. The woman was still cutting. |
"No," she said, smiling. "I'm walking home." |
Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B. |
| Melissa Guerrero and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at nytoday@nytimes.com. |
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